1.2.5-Columbina
Brick!Club 1.2.5 and 1.2.6 Doing a twofer because I have so little to say about Chapter 5. Also apologies for silence this weekend, life stuff, emotions and stuff, also too much alcohol and stuff, because of the emotions and stuff, that sort of thing. 1.2.5 Tranquility Basically Valjean does that thing that I personally am an expert at where you get angry at people for being stupid enough to like you when you don’t deserve it so you try to push them away so that when you succeed you can say see, he never really liked me, see, I was never good enough for her. Only the Bishop doesn’t let him succeed and he is confused. I know that feel, bro. 1.2.6 Jean Valean AW YISS BACKSTORY sorry I feel like starting with an allcaps opening is my thing now? Hahaha, he’s from Brie and the Bishop wants him to work in cheese, I am amused even if no one else is, possibly because I am having brie and wine as we speak because I might be a drunk but I am a classy one. So I was never super into Valjean, but then they got an Australian to play him in the film and all Australians are very proud and protective of all Australian celebrities (except Mel Gibson uh we’re sorry about that one guys) which made me very proud and protective of Valjean whoops. So this is my first time reading the Brick with this much emotion about Valjean, don’t worry everyone, the local bottle-o had 30% off all wine over Easter, I stockpiled in preparation. OKAY, let’s get on with the actual chapter. ”Jean Valjean was of that thoughtful but not gloomy disposition which constitutes the peculiarity of affectionate natures.” AND THERE’S HEARTBREAK, STRAIGHT OUT THE GATE. He is affectionate though, even though he never receives any affection from anyone else, he goes and pays for the milk for the stupid kids instead of letting them get in trouble. There is also ““something decidedly sluggish and insignificant” about him except he’s going to change all that OH MY BABY. Also omfg his mum was Jeanne and his dad was Jean and his sister is Jeanne and he is Jean somebody buy this family a book of baby names please. Well, at least Valjean will take up a whole family’s worth of various names over the years. Adding Jeanne to the ever growing list of ladies whose stories I want to hear, because she doesn’t come off very well in this chapter, what with the giving the good bits of the soup to her kids and all. As affectionate as Valjean is, I guess she must have always been a bit like that to make him do his duty “churlishly”. "Kind woman friend" is a phrase I am going to start trying to work into regular conversation. “The family had no bread. No bread literally. Seven children!” SEVEN CHILDREN. NO BREAD. LITERALLY. OKAY HUGO WE GET IT. “He had a gun which he used better than any one else in the world” okay so I started this chapter with Hugh Jackman on my mind (full disclosure: I start most days with Hugh Jackman on my mind) and I’ve been watching Wolverine promo stuff today and there’s a best at what I do joke in there but I’m too drunk to find it. Also Denny has “He possessed a shotgun which he used for other than legitimate purposes” which is kind of really different to HE WAS THE SINGLE GREATEST RIFLEMAN IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. Can someone else say something intelligent about poachers and smugglers being bad people but still more pure than corrupted city folk and the noble savage? Because I think there’s a thing to be said there, but not by me because I don’t really know what I’m talking about. So then we get to Valjean’s first day at prison and UGH THAT’S FINE I DIDN’T NEED MY HEART FOR ANYTHING ANYWAY but anyway once again we get puppy/child hybrid Valjean and I feel like I should be expressing some 21st century type concern about this poor, innocent, ignorant peasant = seven year old child type thing but I can’t because he’s adorable. But also I love how this passage drives home how instantaneous it was - for years he’s a tree-pruner in Faverolles, one night he makes one bad decision, BAM FIVE YEARS HARD LABOUR AND A LIFELONG STIGMA. (Even though the actual dates say it took a year for him to end up in chains? I’m a little confused about this apparently leisurely approach to justice, someone please fill me in) I like that in this book full of back stories for everyone ever, most of which comes from rumors and gossip, the Valjeans just disappear, because no one bothers to talk about them. I am curious about how that one report did get to him, though. Speaking of, THAT POOR CAT. I cannot imagine any cat taking well to being clung to by a seven year old. Valjean and the many escape attempts that start because its just The Done Thing in prison. It seems like the four escape attempts are a thing that people sometimes struggle to explain in fic because IT REALLY IS A STUPID THING TO DO. I was waiting to get up to this because I couldn’t remember what the Brick explanation was. (Rereading this before hitting post, I noticed that I really do just think of Brick facts as just one possible explanation. Les Mis you have destroyed my concept of canon, I think because the way we differentiate between Brick/Musical/2012 Movie/Other adaptation of choice/Some combination thereof, so what might be Brick canon isn’t necessarily musical canon, so if you want to create something for musical fandom, you can happily disregard it, and vice versa.) I like escape planning as a popular prison hobby. Because you would think after his three days of freedom were so awful he’d just suck it up and finish his sentence. But the other prisoners are like “I’m bored, let’s plan an escape,” and everyone’s like “Shotgun not, that one guard broke my bloody legs after they caught me” and then they’re like “k, Valjean, it’s your turn.” That said getting caught after 4 hours omfg Valjean did you even try? Or did you just try the same thing three times in a row? I can kind of see that, actually, bless your soul. Commentary Amarguerite Oh I can help with the it-took-a-year-for-him-to-end-up-in-chains bit since I just did a bunch of research on trials during the 1820s/30s period. (Caveat, it’s early in the morning, before I’ve had my coffee, after a super long work day yesterday, so I may only be remembering the arrest-questioning-trial thing during Louis-Philippe’s reign and it might have been TOTALLY different during the Empire— I imagine not substantially, because the Napoleonic Code informed almost all French law during the 19th century, but anyhow.) Basically you’re arrested and put in prison to await for charges brought against you and a subsequent trial. Upon the first 24 hours of your arrest, you’re supposed to be questioned, but if the officers in charge of questioning are busy or want to make your suffer, they’ll just ask for your name. Then they’ve technically questioned you. The real questioning could come after months of preliminary imprisonment. And then you could wait for even longer while the judiciary filed formal charges. It’s only after all that the trial process begins. It could easily be almost a year between Valjean’s initial arrest and then his condemnation to the galleys. If you’re curious about trial procedures, read this http://chanvrerie.net/history/revolutionaries/amis-du-peuple-judicial-system/ really helpful excerpt from Jill Harsin’s Barricades (though it’ll tell you more about trials in 1832 than earlier, it still gives a basic overview of what trials were like after the changes instituted during the French Revolution). Sarah1281 (reply to Amarguerite) I don’t believe that the dates necessarily have to be a year apart. All we know of the time of the crime was that it was a Sunday in winter in 1795 and was put in chains on the 22d of April, 1796. Well he may have been arrested the winter of 1794/1795 but I feel it was more likely he was arrested in December of 1795. So it would have been right before Christmas, surprising no one because Valjean’s life is actually impossible of getting more tragic at this point. But yeah, that’s some chilling stuff about having to wait so long if the police or busy or just feel like being jerks. It’s why they needed more officers like Javert who would just process you and move on. Columbina(reply to Sarah1281's reply) RIGHT, because winter is not the middle of the year there! Sorry, my Australian was showing. Actually, I didn’t think that at all, I just saw ‘1795’ and ‘1796’ and went “THAT’S A WHOLE YEAR.” It’s going to be so embarrassing as this goes on and you all realise how bad I am with numbers, given in this same post I called Valjean’s thirty-six hours of freedom ‘three days’. But I’m going to pretend that on this count, I was just being subconsciously Australian. Pilferingapples (reply to Columbina's reply) SOLIDARITY WARM-WEATHER KINDRED I mean winter’s not the middle of the year here, either. It’s on a Tuesday. This year that Tuesday was in January! But sometimes it’s in March? It always throws me a bit when Temperate Climates and Actual Mountains and Rivers start complicating plots. Let’s try and watch out for each other in this book of strange, December-winter having lands. Columbina (reply to Pilferingapples' reply) HIGH FIVE The one that always, always gets me is ‘January storms’. Because we have those! Lots of them! January storms are where it is super gross and humid all day and then in the late afternoon there is a huge and terrible storm and it knocks down trees and powerlines and everyone has holes in their roofs and no lights and sometimes you get flash floods too. So if I read about someone enduring January storms and then suddenly there’s snow, I get all confused. (Also American movie trailers for things that are coming THIS SUMMER and I’m like BUT THAT’S NOT UNTIL THE END OF THE YEAR.) It’s a hard and confusing life in the Southern Hemisphere. Pilferingapples Catching up on past comments! Because THEY WERE GOOD COMMENTS, darn it. I’ve never had a hard time buying the multiple escape attempts, really. Sure, as data points they look stupid, but in the context of the person and the environment they make perfect sense. There’s nothing to do in prison but dream of freedom; but since Valjean’s not actually a career criminal he doesn’t have any solid understanding of what an escapee’s freedom might look like. Someone like Thenardier, later, would have an idea of how to hid and go to ground, contacts, and so on; Valjean just wants out. In a way it’s a sign of how much the prison hadn’t broken him yet; he’s not just accepting his (by this point reasoned-out-to-be) unjust fate, he’s fighting it the only way he can. And Valjean at this point is, to put it mildly, not trained in critical thinking; he’s from an entire life where it was somewhat to his emotional advantage to just keep his head down, act, and endure. I think in a lot of ways Valjean’s journey is as much about learning how to think as how to be; or, at least, that for him they’re sort of the same thing? After all, an affectionate and sensitive nature doesn’t do much good for anyone (especially the sensitive person) if he can’t figure out how to express it? As for the poachers vs.robbers issue— ok, being a hick myself I have VERY STRONG AND UNKIND FEELINGS about poachers and rustlers and suchlike. Those people! Are not nice! Or morally awesome! And I say this with cattle rustlers in my family background! But maybe it ties into that whole idea of education— a poacher might learn to kill, but doesn’t learn to negotiate a criminal underworld? Or at least perhaps a city boy like Hugo thought so, especially given the early Industrial Age romanticizing of the rural life Gascon-en-exil discussed a bit. Anyway, I’m sure 19th C. France was rather a different rural/urban environment that modern or early-modern America…still, really, Hugo? ‘Cause they ain’t all Cravatte. Manypalimpsests (reply to Pilferingapples) What Jean Valjean did was subsistence poaching. It’s a re-occuring feature of peasant societies, because peasants often didn’t/don’t have legitmate access to the resources of the land. Those are usually reserved to the landed gentry, or else to the state/king. So when survival dictates, peasants poach. Illegal deadwood gathering is probably the most common - you go into the forest and pick up the fallen wood for fuel, and hope no one catches you. And if there’s no meat in the house, and you haven’t any laying hens, and the children are hungry, well. Setting snares in rabbit runs is another - a rabbit can fix that, at least for a while. The same thing goes for a grouse or a pheasant, if you can take one. And if you take them in season, and only a few, and don’t get caught, who’s the worse off for it? Peasant poaching was not large scale, and it wasn’t generally commercial. Large landowners hated it, because being able to cultivate your woods in just the right way to get large breeding colonies of fowl and then be able to take gentlemen visitors out and show them your rich, fruitful supply of game and let them shoot a lot of it was a massive status symbol. It served as an affirmation of masculinity and hospitality. (I think it becomes clear later on that Hugo had an enormous amount of sympathy for street survival strategies of the urban poor, too. I don’t think he’s romanticizing here. That is - not in that “longing for an idealized rural past” way. The phantasmargorical, somewhat folkloric People Become Beasts and Beasts Become People way of romanticizing he loves so much, yeah.)